KDE Sees New Features, Bug Fixes Ahead Of Christmas

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Sees New Features, Bug Fixes Ahead Of Christmas

Winter holidays haven't yet slowed down the pace of improvements for the KDE desktop stack. It was another busy week enhancing KDE Plasma and related desktop components with new functionality and fixes...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Pre-Christmas-2020

[f0rmat]

ngraham

Continuing the nice work. The fixes to Dolphin and the plasma widgets (especially the custom shortcuts) is really nice. The graphics driver update fix is nice, too. It is also refreshing that your team listened to some of the concerns about automount defaults.

Keep up the good work.

[uid313]

"With KDE Frameworks 5.78, all KDE software now supports AVIF (AV1) images when libavif is present."

Wow, this is really cool. That all software can get support for more file formats when a library is installed without that software has to do anything. So you just install a image library and all image software now can handle that file, you install a audio format and all your media players can now handle that format, that's really cool.

[acobar]

I know very well that this is just my opinion, but current KDE is, by far, the best DE I have ever used, and I've using computers since 1983, before many here even were born. Yes, it has its flaws, and Wayland support is taking more time to mature than I would like (well, actually, I like and use X network support, have been doing it for years, and the current alternatives used in Wayland are subpar) but I blame the creators of Wayland for it, it should have had, since day one, a central development for most of the libraries needed. Their "it is just a protocol" mantra ended causing much more fragmentation and pain than they devised, I think. Please, no "but Weston?".

Perhaps, they thought about the other protocols we have to deal with, like TCP-IP, SMB, NFS and things like that, but those things were done this way because they should be OS agnostic, if this was one of their presumptions, well, they were outstandingly optimistic, I think.

[smartalgorithm]

what about KWinFT effort? When do you plan to put back all the work done there?

[ngraham]

ngraham

Continuing the nice work. The fixes to Dolphin and the plasma widgets (especially the custom shortcuts) is really nice. The graphics driver update fix is nice, too. It is also refreshing that your team listened to some of the concerns about automount defaults.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks!

[ngraham]

what about KWinFT effort? When do you plan to put back all the work done there?

That would be a question for its developer.

Personally I'm not optimistic. When a codebase gets forked, it inevitably drifts out of alignment with the parent codebase and merging work back or taking patches from the parent become more and more difficult over time. But upstream KWin developers have indicated that they're open to re-integrating work from KWinFT that makes sense.

[vsteel]

ngraham I know the improvements to KDE will eventually trickle down to all distributions but the updates you mention, would those be on existing Neon that would then be a software update away or are they in a beta repository somewhere that will come to Neon in a next major release? I look at the version I have and they are a few off from what you are working on and I am curious of the flow so I can test out some of the new features by loading a cutting edge release on a test system.

[ngraham]

ngraham I know the improvements to KDE will eventually trickle down to all distributions but the updates you mention, would those be on existing Neon that would then be a software update away or are they in a beta repository somewhere that will come to Neon in a next major release? I look at the version I have and they are a few off from what you are working on and I am curious of the flow so I can test out some of the new features by loading a cutting edge release on a test system.

They're all in Neon Unstable already, as it builds packages from git master. Other distros have similar things. Arch and openSUSE have "KDE unstable" repos you can use to get packages built from git master just like in Neon Unstable. Kubuntu has a CI repo that does the same IIRC.

[ms178]

It would be great seeing some of the KwinFT improvements integrated into KDE upstream. I am very pleased with it already, even in its current state.